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Associate Professor of Geology

A Wyoming native who feels most at home in the sage-brushed sandhills of the Powder River Basin, Kirsten Nicolaysen's professional training includes roaming volcanoes from the sub-Arctic to the sub-Antarctic. As an undergraduate at Colorado College, Nicolaysen participated in a KECK consortium geology project to investigate Mt. McLoughlin, one of the southern Cascades volcanoes. Thoroughly enspelled by igneous geochemistry and active volcanoes, she pursued research in the Aleutian Islands for a master's degree at University of Wyoming.

During her doctoral work, Nicolaysen participated in two research cruises: the first to investigate the Southeast Indian Ridge near the islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul and the second to drill into the Kerguelen Plateau, the second largest igneous province on Earth. Nicolaysen has taught at Lawrence University and then for four years at Kansas State University. Between these teaching positions, she was a visiting research professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.) in Belgium. Currently her NSF-funded research focuses on the record of volcanic activity in the Aleutian arc and, in collaboration with archeology colleagues, explores how these volcanoes provided resources and challenges for the Unangax people during prehistory.

Yearly, Nicolaysen designs and mentors student-centered research projects and some of these are in support of Whitman College's affiliation with the Keck Geology Consortium (www.keckgeology.org ). Students pursue field and lab-based experiences to develop their senior thesis and present their work at the Whitman Undergraduate Conference in April every year and sometimes at regional and national geoscience meetings. Many of these students have chosen to attend graduate school in the geosciences or obtain a professional degree in a health-related field or architecture.

Nicolaysen's teaching preparation has ranged from attending intensive workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers to reading pedagogical literature. Her approach to teaching is to engage and direct students through the learning experience using hands-on experiments, semester research projects and discussion of case studies. In 2011 she helped organize the Cutting Edge Workshop on Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry and served as an associate editor to review related online teaching resources.